Yesterday was Lollapalooza's first ever sell out (as is Saturday), cramming over 75,000 people into Grant Park, and it felt we were jostled by every single one during Radiohead's closing headline set. We bumped into fest curator Perry Farrell and spotted a few other celebs standing at the side of the stages. Also in attendance? The sun. One of the loudest cheers we heard all day was when the first cloud blessed us with its......

DeRo has the lowdown on a bunch of other confirmed Lollapalooza acts. We already knew Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, and Rage Against The machine would be headlining, but now you can add Racontuers, Kanye West, and Wilco to that list. We'd bitch about the fact that three of the six headliners have already played Lolla, which in its current incarnation is still a neophyte, but fuck it, we love all the headliners so we'll keep......

Since the 1986 release of his debut album Guitar Town, Chicago has long been home to one of Steve Earle's strongest fan bases. He's such a gifted songwriter that fans often overlook the fact that he's essentially made the same record since 1996, right down to the obligatory duet with a female singer, "state of my life" liner notes and beautiful artwork by his good friend, the local artist and noted unemployed film-goer Tony Fitzpatrick.......

Pitchfork has announced that the super-affordable three-day passes for their festival, along with tickets to Friday night's bill (featuring one band we're really excited to see), are already sold-out. Tickets for Saturday and Sunday are still available. But believe us when we say that with a line-up including (and this is just a teensy sampling) Cat Power, Girl Talk, Oxford Collapse, The New Pornographers, Stephen Malkmus, De La Soul, Klaxons, and The Ponys, we're sure......

The rumors had been swirling about who else would play Friday night at the Pitchfork Music Festival and those rumors turned out to be true for Slint and GZA joining up with Sonic Youth to play a full album. We never heard a peep about Saturday’s headliner of Yoko Ono. Love her or hate her, for a myriad of reasons, John Lennon’s widow is quite the accomplishment for Pitchfork’s Fest in July. Ono is more......

When it rains, it pours. Greg Kot has some line-up information and ticket prices on his blog over at the Tribune for the Pitchfork Music Festival July 13-15, 2007. Tickets don't go on sale until Monday, so if you missed the cheap Lolla tickets like the rest of us, put that money towards this little festival. Cat Power, Clipse, Of Montreal, and Iron and Wine are a few of the bands that Greg lists as......

In all the hubbub with Clusterfest, we missed out a rather significant piece of local music news: the Ponys signed with Matador Records. Matador describes the deal as a worldwide multi-album pact, where they’ll be labelmates with oldsters Yo La Tengo and Mission of Burma as well as Cat Power, Matmos and The New Pornographers. We describe the deal as kind of awesome. Chicagoist likes guitars and rock and therefore we dig The Ponys. And......

Country-music fans (yes, both of you) rejoice: Chicago transplant Kelly Hogan will play a pair of shows tonight at Hideout. But the real music story is tomorrow night, when there are so many quality bands playing in the area that we decided to give you a day’s warning to make the torturous decision. At the Empty Bottle will be the Mountain Goats, a.k.a. John Darnielle. (Chicagoist just loves singer-songwriters that pretend to be full-fledged bands,......